An innovation journey

Life sciences is seeing strong growth given the huge supply and demand imbalance in the sector. On the demand side, we’ve seen phenomenal growth in life sciences companies globally during the past decade. On the supply side, there is basically no purpose-built modern laboratory space for growing companies across Europe. Any existing space is predominantly within university or hospital campuses, or in dated laboratories. There hasn’t been institutional-grade investment into developing life sciences space in Europe. We’ve seen from the United States and the United Kingdom that when capital comes into these companies and they need to grow, they have very little space to expand into. It creates a very strong opportunity for rental growth and high occupancy.

Despite the investor interest, European life sciences is going to remain a very niche sector. The market is location specific. It has to be around the universities and hospitals. It’s not as simple as trying to be the highest bidder for a site or a building. Most of the land around the hospitals and the universities where life sciences companies want to be located are owned in some way by the hospital or by the university. They want to make sure the buyer shares a vision for the long-term development of science-park facilities in collaboration with them to deliver space that will help their companies and their university spin-outs grow and develop. You need to have a strong reputation. Specialty and investment experience will be critical to anyone who is planning on deploying into the sector.